290 History of Animal PlagiLCs. 



In a work entitled ' Considerations concernina; the Dis- 

 temper which still spreads itself among the Horned Cattle in 

 this Kingdom/ by a Physician, and published in 1749, we are 

 made acquainted with some of the causes which led to the ex- 

 tension and retention of the disease in England ; and learn 

 something of its contagious character, and its symptoms, as 

 well as a method of cure. From this treatise we will make 

 some extracts. Speaking of the doctrine of contagion, a sub- 

 ject which was then much debated, and which was for more 

 than a century later to furnish a bone of contention to medical 

 men, and to lead to oftentimes unhappy results by permitting 

 infectious and contagious maladies to run riot amongst man- 

 kind, because certain physicians did not believe in the com- 

 municability of special diseases, he says: ''At present it is my 

 design to consider this doctrine principally as it concerns pesti- 

 lential contagion, and that chiefly in relation to the calamitous 

 distemper which has so long raged among the horned cattle in 

 this island, which I take to be pestilential. Nothing in my 

 humble opinion did so much contribute to the spreading of this 

 terrible distemper at its first breaking out as the heliefthat it ivas 

 not contagious, and the expectation of an effectual remedy for it ; 

 because both those notions had a manifest tendency to lessen 

 the care and vigilance that were necessary to prevent it. In re- 

 gard to the latter of them, I am not ashamed to own I was then 

 an infidel ; and I am so still as to the possibility of the cure be- 

 fore the malignity of the distemper began to decline ; being fully 

 persuaded that what Virgil says on a like occasion is too applic- 

 able to the present as well as every other pestilence in its begin- 

 ning and at its height, viz. that it admitsof very little relief from 

 the Art of Medicine. Such of the most eminent physicians as 

 were first consulted by the Government concerning this dis- 

 temper were certainly of the same opinion as to the difficulty of 

 curing it, and therefore very honestly advised their superiors to 

 employ their authority in enforcing a punctual compliance with 

 the most likely means to stop the progress of it — an attempt 

 which there was then some reason to believe as practicable as it 



was desirable It has been suo-o-ested bv an incjenious 



writer, who some time ago undertook to confute the opinion of 



